Designer/developer Shaun Andrews has previously posted about Better Widgets, while Weston Ruter, who is leading work on the Widget Customizer plugin, has put together his own very detailed proposal this week. Ruter’s proposal at Make WordPress Core includes a great video demo of how the plugin works.

The idea behind Widget Customizer is cool. Each widget gets its own panel in the Customizer (Appearance > Customize) settings and you can edit, move and preview what widgets look like before you hit Save and Publish.

Ruter points out that when making changes to a widget, it could be completely broken and everyone visiting your site would see this because there’s no way to preview changes before saving them. The Widget Customizer Plugin offers a solution.

During this week’s development meeting, Nacin asked the Widgets Customizer team to think more on the widgets UI before a decision is made on whether to incorporate the plugin into core.

TinyMCE Improvements

TinyMCE 4 has been earmarked for inclusion in core. The latest version of TinyMCE will provide an improved UI, an inline editing mode and a more stable core structure to the Post Editor.

The changes will also improve editing and positioning images after they have been added to the Post Editor.

A Better Themes Experience, Part Two

An even better themes experiences has been proposed for WordPress 3.9.

THX38, a reimagining of the theme installation experience, was incorporated into WP 3.8, offering up a more slick UI for theme installation.

WP 3.9 is expected to take that experience a step further with support for multiple screenshots when previewing themes. It’s not clear yet what other improvements could be included in this upgrade.

Upgrades to How Media Are Handled

In the next version of WordPress, the image editor could be moved into the media manager. Other planned improved include enabling users to drop an image or other media directly onto the post screen without having to click the Add Media button.

Greater Audio/Video Support

There are a bunch of ideas he was to see realized: new icons, better documentation of the “new” media code introduced in WP 3.5, subtitles for video, the ability to generate metadata for audio/video files on demand, and audio and video playlist shortcodes.

Other Improvements

Improvements to Multisite are also in the words, though it’s not clear exactly what that will involve.

Javascript and CSS improvements have been proposed, such as breaking wp-admin.css into modules, merging color.css into other CSS files, introducing Grunt tools for patches and inline JavaScript documentation using JSDoc.

There is much to look forward to in future releases. As WordPress evolves into a full-blown CMS, I see some growing pains to endure but I’m impressed with the thoughtful community support & development efforts. Keep up the good work MakeWordPressCore!